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Archie, 4/9/14

Oh look, it’s Jughead’s cousin/homunculus “Souphead”, who isn’t any more beloved by the people in this comic strip than he is by us! Anyway, the most disturbing thing in this strip is Archie’s throwaway joke in panel one, which I guess is meant to be a gentle jibe but comes across much more harshly to me. “We have too many Jugheads already! The optimal number of Jugheads: zero. Why do you persist in occupying space and time in our universe, and thus resisting our beneficial Jughead-quantity-rationalization program?”

Judge Parker, 4/9/14

Oh hey, in case you were wondering, Randy and April managed to get officially married before the Gardia brothers’ mercenary force arrived by helicopter gunship, firing dozens of air-to-ground missiles into the screaming wedding party. As you can probably tell from the first panel here, Randy and April wrote their own vows, and I have for the most part spared you from their blandness. I’ll just say that I’m a little disappointed that the phrase “on top of a pile of money that people gave us for no good reason” did not appear.

Momma, 4/9/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Momma called Francis a tramp! You probably think it’s funny because Momma and/or Mell Lazarus are old and are thus using “tramp” to mean “a person who travels from place to place and does not have a home or much money,” rather than “a woman who has sex with many different men,” which is probably the primary meaning in English today. But considering that Oedipal nightmares are one of this strip’s primary sources of humor, you may be wildly, horribly off-base.

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Mary Worth, 4/8/14

It tells you a lot about Mary Worth as a strip that this storyline about a drug dealing ex-con trying to find his way in mainstream society has mainly been about the quasi-romantic relationship between the ex-con’s mother and a bald advice columnist, and it tells you a lot about me as a person that I’ve been loving every minute of it. Anyway, Wilbur’s attempt to win Iris’s love by driving a wedge between her and Tommy seems to be going exactly as planned! “Yesssss,” he thinks, “women always get super mad at you before they do sex things with you, right? We’re going to do so many sexy things, after I tell her to kick Tommy out. But not yet, Wilbur, not yet! You need to play that trump card at just … the right … moment.”

Mark Trail, 4/8/14

After being savagely beaten by a civilian vigilante, Marlin is finally being taken into custody by legitimate law enforcement officers, and while they’ll probably protect him from further arbitrary physical violence, they are subjecting him to the ultimate insult: symbolically stripping him of his whimsical nickname. No longer will he be permitted to refer to himself as “Marlin”! Noms de taxidermy are reserved for legitimate, non-poaching taxidermists! In the joint he will be known as “Ethan Fauscett,” and he will definitely suffer for it.

Apartment 3-G, 4/8/14

At last, someone is saying what we’ve all been thinking, and it’s Doctor Whatshisname, the large animal vet! I mean, he’s being kinda of harsh about it, but frankly the A3G girls could stand to have the phrase “helpless freak” shouted at them more often.

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• Fundraiser reward note: Thanks to all who contributed to last month’s fundraiser! As of today, everyone who has confirmed their address and reward desires with me has had their reward sent off in the mail. Please let me know if you don’t see it in about a week or so. That said, 31 of you gave enough to get a reward but never replied to my email asking which rewards you wanted and whether I have the right address for you. I’ve been burned often enough by Paypal passing along an incorrect address that I don’t send out rewards until I have this confirmation; if you haven’t received an email from me, please check your spam filter or just write me at bio@jfruh.com and we’ll talk!
• Website technical thingie note: I’ve tweaked the formatting for the site again, so if things look really wonky, you may need to reload the page while holding down the shift key, and if that doesn’t work, you might need to clear your browser cache.